Conflict and Council Meetings

This morning I sat on the floor for twenty minutes while a six-year-old chairwoman led some fifty of us, teachers and students alike, in an important meeting.  We were assembled to figure out what to do about graffiti etched in a bathroom window saying that a fourth-grade student "sucks."  And we were going to stay in the meeting until the insulted student felt satisfied that the problem was resolved.

In other schools, adults might badger those suspected of writing the insulting words, or compare the handwriting.  Or, unable to establish a culprit, teachers might lecture the class or just throw up their hands and do nothing.  Or permission to use the bathroom might be regulated more tightly to give troublemakers fewer opportunities.

None of those things happened in this meeting.  The adults spoke very little.  A culprit was not established, nor did anyone confess.  And at the Free School, the only time anyone ever needs permission to go to the bathroom is during one of these meetings, and they have to ask the chairperson, another student.

The motion that was made and voted into policy by the students was that everyone will have to take a turn cleaning the bathroom until whoever did this fesses up.  The schedule will be created by the student who was insulted by the graffiti.  This motion was made by an eighth grade student and there was little dissent, only some healthy debate about the specifics.

Welcome to a council meeting.

I mentioned briefly in an earlier post that when students have a conflict, one mechanism that the Free School uses to solve it is an all-school council meeting.  Now that I have had a chance to see a few of these in action, I want to tell you more about them.

Students have a lot of freedom and are often relatively unsupervised at the Free School.  Teachers are always nearby but with the exception of pre-schoolers, kids can be in classrooms by themselves, can play on the playground without an adult, and if they are fourth grader or older, can go in a group to nearby parks without a teacher.

Conflicts are inevitable in any school setting but in the Free School there often aren't adults immediately present to squelch them.  And even if adults are in the room, their first course of action is to stand back, watch, and see how the kids do.  Students are empowered and expected to solve conflicts on their own.

If students are unable to work it out themselves, they can approach a teacher, who coaches a student on how to handle it themself.  I might say, "tell him how you feel about that," or "talk to him about what you want in this situation." Often after a little coaching students can then work it out, no further adult intervention necessary.

If they still haven't solved it, students can ask for a mediation.  The students and a teacher get together privately and the teacher helps to mediate the situation.  Sometimes older students do mediations with younger students too.  Mediations aren't about adults telling kids how to work things out or assigning blame.  My role in a mediation is just to help the kids talk to each other more productively.

If a mediation doesn't work or a student doesn't want a mediation, another possible step is a council meeting.  Students will sometimes skip mediation if they have repeated conflicts on the same issue or with the same person, or if the problem is a whole-school issue.  It is always the student's decision whether they want a mediation or prefer a council meeting.  Teachers can also call council meetings.

Council meetings are a big deal because the whole school has to drop everything they are doing and get together right then and there, so they are called infrequently - about once or twice a week.  Unlike most activities at the Free School, they are mandatory - if you skip one, you are sent home for the day.  The kids enforce attendance upon one another. 

Here are some examples of reasons we have had council meetings this year:

*Some fifth and sixth grade girls were engaged in cliquish behavior that made another friend uncomfortable.
*Two junior high girls got mad at a classmate for telling on them when they had gum and candy.  They called him names and several adults and students were upset about this.
*A fourth grade girl and a fifth grade boy got into an argument about sharing art supplies.  He called her names and they yelled at each other.
*A teacher was upset because students had not been completing their lunch clean-up jobs in a timely fashion.

A council meeting begins with nominations for a student chair to lead the meeting. The chair then asks who called the council meeting and what the problem is that led them to call for a meeting. If the problem is a conflict between two students, both students tell their side of the story.

In schools where I have worked before, calling students out on misbehavior was always difficult. Kids tend to lie and become defensive to avoid getting in trouble, and as an adult it was my job to try to get kids to own up and take responsibility. I sometimes didn't know whether to trust a kid or whether they were lying. I often didn't have time in a classroom of 25 kids to maintain the conversation long enough to diffuse defensiveness and get to the real heart of the matter - sometimes my conversations were more expedient than productive.

Council meetings establish accountability in a completely different framework. Kids are more likely to be honest because there are not punishments at stake. Students are not only accountable to adults - they hold each other accountable as a community. They push for the truth and question details of a story that don't make sense.  They publicly empathize with one another, affirming that they know how an injured student must feel.  They take each other's problems seriously and they expect everyone else to do the same. When faced with the social pressure of the whole school, most kids who are on the receiving end of council meeting scrutiny drop the defensiveness and try to make the situation better.

Sometimes the exact details of what happened or who did what aren't necessary to know, because the focus of the council meeting is how to solve to problem. Students ask each other, "what will solve this problem?"  and "does this solve your problem?"  The answer to the last question has to be affirmative before the meeting can end.

Voting for a chairperson

Sometimes our butts get really sore from sitting on that floor.  Sometimes there is a long, awkward silence while the six-year-old chairwoman tries to remember an older kid's name to call on them.  Today there were dozens of those silences.  Sometimes a kid talks to much.  Sometimes someone makes a suggestion that seems like a bad idea from my adult perspective.  But this is what democracy looks like and at the end of the meeting, everyone is grateful that their struggles are not only theirs alone.